Archive for the ‘Questions’ Category
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So I finished the 16-hour course on eLearning last week. I really enjoyed it. I thought we covered a lot of the fundamentals that contribute to the creation of engaging and motivating learning experiences. Michael Allen’s model of Context, Challenge, Activity, Feedback is something I’ll be chewing on for a while.
A colleague of mine also introduced me to David Merrill’s model of an effective learning environment, which I think echos, and in other ways, subsumes Allen’s methodology. Merrill identifies the first principles of instruction as 1) activation of prior experience, 2) demonstration of skills, 3) application of skills, and 4) integration of these skills into real-world activities. His point is that instructional practice concentrates primarily on 2) the demonstration of skills by itself, without paying much attention to 1), 3), and 4). By ignoring prior experience, potential application, and the world we live in, what do we get? Learners looking bored, disaffected, and turning their brains off in the classroom.
Merrill’s schema matches up somewhat with my thoughts on building a learning community. For me, a community starts with personal skills and knowledge development [prompted by the presentation of a shared problem worth solving], continues with finding good models (”show me how” you solved this problem) [number 2 in Merrill's model], the personal risk of trying it yourself [principle 3 in Merrill's model], and then reflecting and sharing with others what you learned [an aspect of Merrill's 4th principle, integration]. This cycle repeated over and over again equals, in my mind, a vibrant learning community, whether that’s teachers learning about teaching or students learning about any given discipline.
It’s not so much “how” a teacher delivers content; the “how” of pedagogy begins to fade when we look at “what” the goals of instruction are and how they are relevant to students’ lives. What really matters is the problem that teachers are presenting for students to solve, or the problems that teachers and students are working to solve together. If Merrill’s model holds true, than the crucial problem of good instruction is to find, identify, or create problems worth solving.
“Teaching” = “Probleming”
The principle quest of a teacher becomes, “What questions or problems are relevant to my student’s lives that could be in some way answered or solved by all of this content we have at our disposal?” That is the starting place.
Thanks to my colleague, Mark Weiss, for prompting these thoughts.
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Yesterday, in the online ASTD course, our facilitator emphasized that one of the biggest challenges facing instructional designers today is the emphasis on CONTENT PRESENTATION instead of PERFORMANCE OUTCOMES. Why is it so easy for us to fall into the trap of believing that telling is teaching? We tell, then test. Tell some more, then test. Tell, test. Tell, test. Tell, test. In an endless cycle. When transfer doesn’t occur, we tell some more or tell our students, “you need to work on…” and then leave it at that.
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
—Albert Einstein
What a different world this would be if, instead, we started with specific behaviors and skills that we wanted to see everyone master, found out exactly where each student was at with regards to those performance outcomes, and set up a system in the classroom where it was everyone’s responsibility to ensure that everyone in the class mastered that clearly defined set of performance outcomes.
This is the slow way. But it is also the sure way. Teachers will not be able to cover as much “content” as they might otherwise, nor will they be able to justify much of what they do in the classroom, since it doesn’t directly relate to specific outcomes. They will have to really ask themselves, hopefully in the context of their department’s overall objectives, what do I really want my students to be able to do?
Students will come to understand through your insistence and repetition what level of mastery you expect and they will know that neither you nor their peers will stop until that level of mastery is achieved by everyone. This isn’t to say that you can’t have differentiation to ensure that students who achieve mastery of the basic performance outcomes can move on to more advanced performance outcomes or to ensure that students who struggle with basic performance outcomes have the freedom to work at their level. The point is that the varying standards for outcomes are spelled out and returned to again and again (in a kind and loving way, of course!).
I like one of Carol Gaab’s strategy for differentiation. She writes a list of language structures on the board that she is focusing on for the day and makes it clear that that list is required learning. Everyone will gain mastery of those structures, sooner or later. Then, on a different wall she lists more advanced language structures or vocabulary that students can work with on their own. Carol will occasionally point to a structure in that advanced list with her laser pointer when she uses it in her storytelling, but she won’t make a big deal out of it. That way students who are ready to absorb that new information can do so. And they stay engaged. For more on Carol’s approach to FL teaching, visit http://www.tprstorytelling.com/.
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During my second eLearning course, we were reminded that in many ways, computers are the dumbest things on earth. The great advantage that human teachers have over computers is that they are responsive. They can immediately tailor instruction to meet a learner where they are at, to answer their specific questions, and to explain things in ways that make sense to the individual. Human teachers can listen, reflect, care, joke, laugh, and support. Computers will never do that.
Computers are at a tremendous disadvantage because they can’t rely on any kind of social presence to create an environment where learning can occur. Instead designers have to rely on creating interactive experiences that do three things:
1) Enhance the learner’s motivation to learn,
2) Focus learners on behavior-enhancing tasks, and
3) Create meaningful and memorable experiences.
[All of these points come from Michael Allen's stuff.]
So where a teacher might be able to focus primarily on Content Structure and Sequencing (as well as, we hope, leveraging the social aspect of classroom learning), an eLearning designer has to successfully overcome additional challenges, including:
*Navigation,
*Learner Interface,
*Motivation, and
*Instructional Interactivity
By Instructional Interactivity, Allen means more than just clicking buttons, dragging and dropping objects, fancy animations, clever narrations, well-produced video, or interesting mouseovers. None of those things by themselves actually motivate learners or help them retain information. But the model he uses for interactivity is important. And I think this is where computer based learning might have something to teach teachers. Stripped of all the social power that teachers carry, the best eLearning seems to satisfy the four categories of this model:
CONTEXT
Do teachers provide a framework or a context for what they are trying to teach? Can they successfully persuade students why certain skills are important to develop?
CHALLENGE
Do teachers design challenges or problems that are sufficiently interesting to engage students’ imagination?
ACTIVITY
Are the activities designed to help students rehearse the patterns of thought that we have set up in the context? Do students have enough “time on task” to develop habits and embed behaviors in their long-term memories?
FEEDBACK
Do we provide immediate feedback that helps learners to adjust? If students can succeed in a class without* paying attention to teacher feedback (i.e. they can sort of slide through the class on half a brain), then real feedback isn’t happening.
In all of these ways, we are challenged to think more clearly about our own flavors of Instructional Interactivity, and whether or not our learners are really taking away something meaningful and memorable. If you see a lack of motivation in your own learning/teaching space, this model may offer a way forward.
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This week, I’ve started taking an online eLearning course through ASTD. One of the big differences between what I see in education and what many of these corporate educators and trainers are dealing with, is that certain aspects of their businesses sink or swim based on how well they can train their people to grease the wheels. This learning they design still leans in favor of the organization and not the individual (no, they don’t really* care about developing their employees, not as much as they care about the bottom line). But at least there’s accountability. At least learning carries with it some dollar amount equal to the organization’s training budget.
I can’t help but wonder, what are we doing in school? I mean, really. What are we doing?
What do we know about learning from a cognitive standpoint? The research tell us:
- Human brains do not receive and process information like “video tape recorders.” They deconstruct input, then reconstruct meaning.
- Every brain is wired differently from every other brain, individually processing information in ways unique to that wiring.
- People are natural explorers, using hypothesis testing to process information. This tendency can be observed in early infancy and is probably genetic.
- Practice increases learning. Repetition and rehearsal are critical for the successful creation of long-term memories.
- Half of the human brain cortex is devoted to processing visual information.
- We process visual information more effectively than any other type.
- People do not learn optimally from continuous, long stretches of linearly supplied information. Deliberate … breaks are… critical for comprehension.
- Stressed brains do not learn the same way as non-stressed brains.
So what do we do in school?
Okay, let’s stress everyone out, teachers and students alike so that people can’t really connect the dots in meaningful ways. Let’s supply linear information in unending units and expect everyone to move faster or slower than some imaginary average. Or let’s interrupt a student right before they get in the zone or have an AHA moment. Let’s dish out the verbal information and not let people make visual sense of their world. Let’s give students just enough time to rehearse and retrieve information so that it goes in and promptly out of short-term memory. Let’s keep everyone so busy that there is rarely any time to relax and explore, to question, and to find meaning. And let’s create a thousand learning disorders for brains that aren’t wired like mine.
Okay, good.
It drives me bonkers that so much of what goes on in schools is anti-learning, anti-meaning, anti-relationship, anti-fun, anti-personal.
It just doesn’t make sense. After all the research, are we really going to just sit around and call this learning? There have got to be better ways.
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SnapZ Pro: Snapz Pro X allows you to effortlessly record anything on your screen, saving it as a QuickTime movie or screenshot that can be emailed, put up on the web, or passed around however you want. This is the tool used in the World Language Lab to create training materials for the World Language faculty. That said, I am increasingly drawn to ScreenFlow. It’s more spendy, but well worth it. May have to switch, though we all love Ambrosia. iShowU is another screen capture app.
SnapzProX
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YouTube: A popular video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in mid February 2005 by three former PayPal employees and was acquired in November 2006 by Google, Inc. Other similar services include TeacherTube, Google Video, and Yahoo! Video.
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Wiki: A collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”. Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis and is the source for many of the definitions in this glossary. A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Many wikis are open to the general public without the need to register any user account. Sometimes session log-in is requested to acquire a “wiki-signature” cookie for autosigning edits. Many edits, however, can be made in real-time, and appear almost instantaneously online. This can lead to abuse of the system, but it can also lead to up-to-the minute information contributed by those who take ownership over a particular piece of knowledge. Wikis can be powerful tools for collaborating on projects and sharing information.
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Vodcast: Video podcast (sometimes shortened to vidcast or vodcast) is a term used for the online delivery of video on demand video clip content via Atom or RSS enclosures. The term refers to the distribution of video where the RSS feed is used as a non-linear TV channel to which consumers can subscribe using a PC, TV, set-top box, media center or mobile multimedia device. One popular aggregator of vodcasts and other online video content is miro.
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Visual Thesaurus: The Visual Thesaurus is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus with an innovative user interface that helps students to understand language in an exciting new ways. Students can type a word in English, French, German, or Spanish and see related word families visually represented on a mindmap, much akin in someways to software like Inspiration. The two applications might be combined in some interesting ways.
visual thesaurus
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UCLS WebCal: The UCLS WebCal is a resource calendaring system designed to facilitate the check-in and check-out of WLL equipment and the scheduling of the lab for use by teachers, language classes, and individual students. WLD faculty can only reserve the lab by visiting this online calendar. An iCal feed is available, which will allow iCal users to view the lab’s ever-changing schedule on their own computers.
webcal
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Several times a week, prospective parents and curious onlookers pop their heads in the lab to see what is going on. It’s probably hard to tell, so I thought I’d write a quick post explaining the different areas of the lab and a general outline of activities.
As this diagram shows, there are four areas in the lab: a Welcome Area, an Instructional Area, a Project Area, and a Training Area.
In the WELCOME AREA, we have a Plasma TV for viewing movies in a cozy carpeted area. This is where lower school classes come to play games or watch videos and where the Classic Film Club sits during their screenings. Above the plasma TV, we have three displays that point to the hallway, which allow us to share with passersby some of what we are doing in the lab.
In the INSTRUCTIONAL AREA, we have one Teacher Station and 24 Student Stations. These are all Intel iMacs outfitted with Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, Apple’s pages, numbers, keynote, iTunes, GarageBand, iMovie, and iChat, and other goodies like Comic Life, Photo Booth, and Skype. We also have an overhead projector and speakers for showing movies and presentations to the class.
The INSTRUCTIONAL AREA features a unique piece of software called DiLL (DIgital Language Lab). This is what teachers use the most when they bring their classes to the lab. DiLL allows teachers to assign listening and speaking exercises to students. Students can listen to audio prompts and hold down the space bar (much like a walkie-talkie) to record their responses in the target language. These responses are then saved to a server and made accessible online, so that teachers can assess comprehension, pronunciation, and speaking skills. See this post for audio clips of what students hear when they are working in DiLL.
In the PROJECT AREA, students and teachers work in groups on multimedia projects. This area is outfitted with 6 22″ TV displays and 6 mac Minis, mounted on the back of each collaborative workstation. Headphones allow up to six students per station to listen to the their projects without disrupting others. All six of the computers are running the new Leopard operating system (Mac OS 10.5), Adobe CS3 products (i.e. Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash), Apple iWork, and iLife software.
Finally, in the TRAINING AREA, we have two G5’s running Final Cut Pro for professional video editing. There are no language classes using this software, but the Filmmaking Club has taken advantage of it as well as iMovie and iStopMotion for some of their projects this year. Next to the G5’s are four more iMacs for teacher use. Teachers can scan materials and digitize cassette and video tapes. This is where I usually work with the teachers to train them on new software and work with them to plan new and exciting projects for the classroom.
All told, there are 43 desktop computers and 30 mobile laptops available to the World Language faculty to use with their classes.
With an average of thirty reservations per week, the lab is a busy place! Mix in parent-teacher conferences, independent study and testing, tutoring, and project-planning and you start to get the idea. There are usually two or more activities going on in the lab at any given time. It’s great fun and very stimulating to see so many students and teachers taking advantage of the space and these powerful tools.
Just to put the lab in perspective, many colleges do not have this kind of equipment and space at their disposal specifically devoted to language learning. We are truly lucky and deeply indebted to the many members of the Lab Community who have made and continue to make this resource a reality.
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UCLS Webmail: UCLS Webmail is a service available to students and faculty at University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Since many students do not frequently access their school email until pressed upon to do so, language learning activities that require the use of this technology will serve a dual purpose: to strengthen their language skills and their connection to official school communication. The username and password used for UCLS email are required to sign on to the computers and the DiLL software in the World Language Lab (WLL). Third, fourth, and fifth graders who have not yet received an email account are given an alternate way to sign on to WLL computers.
ucls webmail
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Text Messaging: Text messaging, or texting is the common term for the sending of “short” (160 characters or fewer) text messages, using the Short Message Service (SMS), from mobile phones. It is available on most digital mobile phones and some personal digital assistants with onboard wireless telecommunications. The individual messages which are sent are called text messages, and more colloquially SMSes, texts, or even txts (in “text speak”). The most common application of the service is person-to-person messaging, but text messages are also often used to interact with automated systems, such as ordering products and services for mobile phones, or participating in contests like Eurovision.
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Skype: The main difference between Skype and VoIP clients is that Skype operates on a peer-to-peer model, rather than the more traditional server-client model. The Skype user directory is entirely decentralized and distributed among the nodes in the network, which means the network can scale very easily to large sizes (currently about 220 million users) without a complex and costly centralized infrastructure. Because Skype is so easily available to computer users in other countries, language learners can easily communicate with people around the world in their target language. Skype calls can also be recorded using applications like eCamm’s Call Recorder.
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RSS: RSS (which, in its latest format, stands for “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”, contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually. Popular RSS readers include NetNewsWire, Google Reader, and the RSS readers built in to Safari and Mozilla Firefox web browsers.
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Keynote: Keynote is a presentation software application developed as a part of the iWork productivity suite (which also includes Pages and Numbers) by Apple Inc.. Released in August 2007, the latest version, Keynote 4, runs on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard only. Lawrence Lessig and Aaron Swartz frequently use Keynote for pitching using a technique referred to as “slides as chorus” or the Lessig Method. The presenter speaks fluently and never refers to the slides or reads from them. Each slide contains either a simple graphic or a very short string of text, sometime a single word. While speaking, the slides are advanced in sync with what is being said, so there can be several slides displayed per sentence. The fast paced presentation style enables a skilled pitcher to create excitement and inject humor into their presentation. Here is a good example of Lessig following his own recommendations.
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Quia: An online quizing appliccation that allows teachers to upload content and design a multitude of games and learning activities. Question types include multiple choice, true-false, pop-up, multiple correct, fill-in, initial answer, short answer, essay, matching, and correct ordering. Teachers can create class pages for communicating with students and track quiz results, maintain an online schedule and calendar, upload images and audio clips, copy and modify any of Quia’s two million activities to suit your own needs, and share your activities with colleagues around the world. When you create an activity on Quia, you get your own personal URL that you can share with anyone. Language quizing content that is designed in iFlash can be easily exported to Quia. Quia is great way for students to study vocabulary on their own.
quia
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There are a lot of ways that you can change the world. Usually, people who change the world(s) they live in persuade others to change their behavior in one way or another. They do this is by sending a clear message to the others about what they stand for. How do we send and receive these kinds of messages?
* By talking to each other (listening)
* By writing to each other (reading)
* By singing to each other (listening)
* By acting (drama) for each other (observing)
* By building things for each other (observing)
* By the way we treat each other (observing)
* Etc., etc.
These messages are often sent through MEDIA. Media was paper. Media was radio. Media was TV. But today, Media is the Internet, particularly blogs and podcasts. A person who really has something to say or anticipates having something to say in the future should master these Media. Today, you don’t have to be rich and powerful to let your voice be heard. It is easier than it has ever been in the history of the world for you to share your voice with global audiences.
Teachers and students in the World Language department will begin learning how to Podcast using GarageBand and other Apple products this coming Tuesday. If you’d like to see what we’re up to in the Podcasting department, check out WLDX Connect, our online podcast station. You can even subscribe to our media feeds via the iTunes store. Click on these links and iTunes will open and take you to our shows: SPANISH@LAB, LATIN@LAB, CHINESE@LAB, FRENCH@LAB, and GERMAN@LAB.
So watch out world. We are about to unleash the voices and talents of Lab students and teachers.
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Podcast: The term “podcast” is a portmanteau of the name iPod and broadcast; a “pod” refers to the iPod, and “cast” to the idea of broadcasting. Specifically, Podcast means, Portable OnDemand broadCAST. In other words, a podcast is a collection of files (usually audio but may include video) residing at a unique web feed address. People can “subscribe” to this feed by submitting the feed address to an aggregator (like iTunes - software that runs on the consumer’s computer). When new “episodes” become available in the podcast they will be automatically downloaded to that user’s computer. Unlike radio or streaming content on the web, podcasts are not real-time. The material is pre-recorded and users can check out the material at their leisure, offline. World Language teachers can create podcasts of language-related tasks and activities, which students can then subscribe to on their computers and sync to their iPods, if they wish.
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MyTunes RSS: MyTunesRSS allows you to access the music and videos from your iTunes library over a local network or the internet. You can access your music from all over the world using a simple web browser. The World Language Lab uses MyTunes RSS to grant students and teachers access to media content for various classroom applications. The user interface allows teachers to search for titles or browse the WLL Media Library by album, artist or genre.
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